Café du Cycliste Leverages Shopify Plus for Fast Speed and High Flexibility

About Café du Cycliste & Project

About Café du Cycliste

Café du Cycliste is a premium French cycling and outdoor apparel brand rooted in Côte d’Azur (French Riviera), France that sells high-quality sportswear. They are dedicated to sharing a passion for cycling and the outdoors.

Café du Cycliste mainly sells B2C but they also sell to agents and B2B stores through a powerful website for selling online and two local stores in France (Ventoux store & Nice store) and one in Spain (Mallorca store).

About the Project

The Challenge

Running on the Magento/Adobe Commerce platform, the Café du Cycliste website experienced several issues, but the two main ones are:

Lack of flexibility to customize the frontend

The previous Café du Cycliste system was in the Magento platform and has been built for years. Therefore, several modules were not user-friendly anymore as the technology has been changing quickly. It led to difficulties for the Café du Cycliste team to customize and update those modules when needed. The updates related to the frontend were especially the main concerns of Café du Cycliste, it took too much time and effort to get done. As a result, it increased the website maintenance cost.

Slow website speed

Slow site performance dramatically impacts the customers’ buying experience, so Café du Cycliste is eager to have a solution that gives faster performance than the current platform of Magento.

Project Objectives & Scope

The ultimate goal that Café du Cycliste wanted to achieve with the Shopify Plus development project with BSS Commerce was to seamlessly migrate the current eCommerce system from Magento to Shopify Plus including:

• Website platform: Shopify Plus
• Website interface: Follow the new frontend design
• Website function: All functions needed to run an eCommerce system on Shopify
• Integrations: Integration with tools and systems such as ERP, shipping management, marketing, customer support tools, and so on.

One important thing was that the Café du Cycliste team wanted to complete the new website building in September 2024 before they entered the new collection season. It meant that we only had 3 months for this project including the discovery and development time. Thus, we had to have a proper project management methodology and estimate the timeline strictly to finish the project on time but with the best success solution.

The Ultimate Solution

Website platform

As the old system was built on the Magento platform for a long time, it lacked of flexibility to customize the frontend, giving particular obstacles to the Café du Cycliste team to use and update things. Additionally, the site loaded slowly, negatively impacting customer experience. BSS Commerce had consulted to migrate the old platform to Shopify Plus, known for its more visualized and easier-to-use page builder, robust infrastructure for high performance, and advanced capabilities for enterprise-level businesses.

Website interface

Regarding the website interface, Café du Cycliste required us to follow their pre-made design work and come up with a solution to bring it to life. With our experience and expertise, our team worked together to review the design, check, and propose a solution that bore the balance between delivering the exact user interface and user experience that Café du Cycliste desired and still ensuring flexibility for future changes.

We chose to use the Eurus theme – a fast, feature-rich, mobile-first theme and Pagefly – a page builder app, for the frontend sections.

During this new design implementation, there were several parts that the Eurus theme or the Pagefly app didn’t support, the BSS Commerce team actively customized the theme code and built custom sections to have these parts rightly displayed as in the client’s design files.

Website functionalities

The BSS Commerce team has set up over 65 functionalities for the Café du Cycliste website on the Shopify Plus platform. Here are some typical ones:

Multi-market setup

Café du Cycliste sells products in 11 markets and with 5 separate languages, covering almost all countries in the world. Hence, the BSS Commerce team leveraged the Shopify Markets feature to set different markets with different languages.

GeoIP redirection

Due to selling in a large number of markets, the Café du Cycliste team would have the ability to auto-redirect customers based on their IP addresses with some special conditions. This function was implemented by using an app; however, the original function of the app didn’t meet the requirements of the Café du Cycliste team.

The BSS Commerce team has worked closely with the support team of the app to clarify requirements for them and had some customization for the website, delivering the results as the client expected.

Language translation

Because there are 5 languages, Café du Cycliste requires an option for translation which is easy for their team to use and also supports auto translation. BSS Commerce suggested using the Langify app which can meet Café du Cycliste’s needs and is also compatible with Pagefly – the page builder app the store uses.

WordPress blog migration

The old system was integrated with WordPress for blog page content. The number of all blog posts was over 700 and a large number of them used custom layouts. It challenged us to find a way to transfer all the content from WordPress to Shopify while still keeping the page layout styles.

The BSS Commerce team had to review precisely to have a solution that could migrate all content from WordPress to Shopify and a solution for styling page layout after migrating content. Firstly, articles pages were moved to Shopify as the HTML code for the data integrity. All the backend data for the blog pages including title, content, images, and hyperlinks,… were transferred to Shopify’s pages. After that, our developers customized codes to keep the layout styles the same as in the old website.

Here are the results:

With the blog landing page and other new blog posts that Café du Cycliste will publish later, we recommended using the default Shopify page builder or Pagefly page builder app for intuitive and easy-to-use building and editing.

The Development Process

Throughout 3 months of working on the project, BSS Commerce and Café du Cycliste collaborated closely with each other to get the project done in success.

Key Milestones

The project started in June 2024 with the first phase of discovery. Then it had 2 months for the development phase. Alongside is the User Acceptant Testing (UAT) phase in the first two weeks of September.

After 3 months of hard work, the Café du Cycliste website on the new Shopify Plus platform went live perfectly on 18th September 2024.

Discovery phase

Our BSS Commerce team had about 1 month for the discovery phase, including learning about the old system, listing all the functions of the system, and reviewing with the customer to have a list of functions that will be needed in the new website on Shopify Plus.

Because this project was to rebuild the entire site, the discovery phase needed to be done very carefully and reviewed many times with the client to ensure that there were no missed requirements and that we and the client were on the same page with the team.

After thoroughly understanding the system and the Café du Cycliste team’s requirements, our Shopify experts analyzed and defined the most suitable solutions to meet all customer expectations. 189 software requirements specification (SRS) pages were written and ready for development.

Development phase

After having a detailed solution for the entire project, the team had around 2 months to develop the new store on the Shopify platform with the Shopify Plus plan. The project ran in a series of sprints and each sprint lasted 2 weeks. After each sprint, there were deliverables submitted to the client for review.

Once the client reviewed and gave timely feedback, the team arranged resources to update according to timely feedback immediately instead of putting it all at the end of the project to resolve. Thus, we could ensure to finish the project in time as we had committed with the Café du Cycliste team. Also, Slack, Google Meet, Google Drive, and Jira were the main tools we used to communicate with the client and manage the project, ensuring we had timely responses and followed strict deadlines.

The Results

The project was successfully finished in just 3 months as the timeline BSS Commerce confirmed with the client.

Summary

BSS Commerce’s mission is to provide the best-in-class services to help businesses grow. The success of this Shopify Plus project with our dear client Café du Cycliste is another event to reinforce our mission.

BSS Commerce ensures a smooth migration to Shopify Plus, optimizing performance, reducing costs, and providing a future-proof solution for your business in the digital transformation age. Become the next BSS Commerce client and let’s work together to maximize your eCommerce website’s returns!